Bloodshot Review: Repetitive ft. Cool Nanites

Bloodshot is an action/Sci-Fi film directed by Dave Wilson and starring Vin Diesel, Eiza González, Sam Heughan.

Sci-Fi galore

It always amazes me how every Vin Diesel movie always has an element of “family” in it. Look at the entire Fast and Furious franchise. And now we have the superhero movie Bloodshot, which is also pushed forward by “family”.

Bloodshot follows Ray Garrison, a soldier, who is reanimated with superpowers after he and his wife are murdered. However, that might just be far from the truth.

This movie is boring. Yes, boring. Don’t get me wrong, the concept is somewhat interesting. The execution, however, is a different matter altogether. So, reanimated Ray is controlled by Dr. Emil Harting, with techie Eric and side-goons KT and jimmy Dalton. Harting essentially wipes out Ray’s memory and rewrites it with the same story, but exchanges the villain with one of his enemies. And he does that over and over again, using Ray to do his dirty work.

All of them also have cool parts, because like Ray, they are also either previously dead or injured soldiers. Harting has a robot arm, KT has a waterproof breathing thing and Jimmy has super legs. Ray’s blood cells have been replaced by nanites which quickly patch him up when he’s injured.

But that is where the coolness ends. You see, Bloodshot is, like Ray’s life, an endless parade of the same thing. From the first moment you realise that the arrangement’s not right, and it doesn’t help there are stupid penis jokes throughout the movie. The movie’s attempts at humour are so silly and infantile that they’re annoying. However, Lamorne Morris does somewhat of a decent job with the funny elements. Wigans is a genius techie and Eric stole his open-source code to create Ray’s body. The moment that point is mentioned, you know Wigans is hacking into the system sometime in the future.

The action sequences are one too many, and after a while are boring and repetitive. That’s partially because the editing is so quick and choppy that you won’t be able to follow what’s going on for too long. Also, the PG-13 rating doesn’t help. The nanites flying around and assembling Ray is cool though.

The elevator fight sequence seemed like a mesh between Mission Impossible and Spider-Man and weirdly reminded me of Dr. Otto Octavius. Also, I was really confused about the layout of the elevator and the ground because the way it played out in Bloodshot, well, it just seemed a bit impossible. The CGI too does not provide any relief in the sequence either.

Moreover, by the end of the movie, you won’t care about half of these characters. There’s nothing here, just some action sequences and an attempt at giving a backstory to the title character. Also, there’s a character whose entire trait is chewing gum and sticking it in different places. None of this makes the movie an interesting watch though.

Summing up: Bloodshot

Bloodshot tries to outsmart the audience by declaring that Eric has based much of his simulation on different movies. As if coping a movie even during a simulation is cool or funny. The movie has its moments of wonder where you do look on, wide-eyed. It’s just that those sequences are very less, and very far in between. It provides nothing new or mind-blowing, and if the creators are thinking of a sequel, then I think we’re good.

Bloodshot is streaming on Amazon Prime Video.

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